Yearly Archives: 2010

Ok so I must say that the portals in Stormwind and Ogrimmar are nice to get the new content. The thing that would be nice would be if it were a little more consistent. What I refer to is the bi-directional portal in Twilight Highlands and Deepholm. The other zones need a portal back to Stormwind. Ya I know we can hearth but I like things that are consistent, especially for Uldum. If not that then at least put a portal from Stormwind to Dalaran so we can then take the portal to the Caverns of Time.

All in all travel in the new content is much better than it has been in previous levels of content. The thing is that travel between sections of content by level brackets for expansions leaves a bit to be desired. Travel from Outlands to Northrend sucks as it does not exist. Travel from 1-60 and Northrend is by boat only, so it sucks as well.

So all in all travel is good for current content and well is lacking for previous tiers of content, maybe when the redo Outlands and Northrend in future expansions we may see something interesting.

Ok after several days of the current Guild XP system it is evident that it is a complete waste of effort. Blizzard has taken a concept that was cool and added nice flavor to the game for guilds and made it suck and suck big time.

The major problem is the xp required is a very steady linear increase, hence why we need to have such a low XP Cap per day. Otherwise even moderately active 10 and 25 man guilds would already be level 10-20 by now. Now is when the bonuses form the guild system are the most needed and useful, in 4-5 months they will be nice to have but more of an “oh yay” rather than that is “@#$# Awesome”. Way to piss on a new “Advertised” feature there Blizz.

The way to have a system that works for all guilds of all levels of activity is to have a Geometric/Exponential XP increase needed between levels of tiers of levels.

For example a better system would be to break it into 5 tiers.

Levels 1-5 are a linear growth like you have now except maybe a little steeper so the XP/Day can be increased by 300% or just removed. Then each tier the next 5 levels are some multiple of XP per level of the previous teirs XP needed each level.

Below is a Chart using a progression similar to what I describe here.

Level

1

2

3

4

5

2

16,580

16,580

16,580

16,580

16,580

3

18,240

18,240

18,240

18,240

18,240

4

19,900

19,900

19,900

19,900

19,900

5

21,550

21,550

21,550

21,550

21,550

6

23,210

33,160

49,740

66,320

82,900

7

24,880

36,480

54,720

72,960

91,200

8

26,530

39,800

59,700

79,600

99,500

9

28,200

43,100

64,650

86,200

107,750

10

29,850

46,420

149,220

265,280

414,500

11

31,510

66,320

164,160

291,840

456,000

12

33,170

72,960

179,100

318,400

497,500

13

34,830

79,600

193,950

344,800

538,750

14

36,490

86,200

447,660

1,061,120

2,072,500

15

38,140

92,840

492,480

1,167,360

2,280,000

16

39,800

132,640

537,300

1,273,600

2,487,500

17

41,450

145,920

581,850

1,379,200

2,693,750

18

43,110

159,200

1,342,980

4,244,480

10,362,500

19

44,770

172,400

1,477,440

4,669,440

11,400,000

20

46,430

185,680

1,611,900

5,094,400

12,437,500

21

48,100

265,280

1,745,550

5,516,800

13,468,750

22

49,750

291,840

4,028,940

16,977,920

51,812,500

23

51,410

318,400

4,432,320

18,677,760

57,000,000

24

53,070

344,800

4,835,700

20,377,600

62,187,500

25

54,730

371,360

5,236,650

22,067,200

67,343,750

Total

855,700

3,060,670

27,762,280

104,108,550

297,910,620

As can be seen using a multiple of 2 will require 3 times the amount of XP than the current system overall and a cap increase of at least 3 times the current would be required to keep the about the same progression. However it front loads a few of the features more conducive to leveling and getting money into the guild bank while everyone is leveling and gearing up, which should have been though of before the stupid low cap was put in, or at least the 5% going to the guild bank should have been level 1 or 2 guild perk.

I was not in Beta but I know the guild xp was reset many times to try and find a happy medium. They were not able to so implemented a low xp cap per day to not give the 200+ member guilds an extreme advantage, more than they already have. Here is the thing, we the players are all gamers or a large percentage of us are and the rest follow our optimizations. Adapt to it and implement a fun system not something cool but so limited it is useless when we want to use it most.

Of course it is now too late. I wish there had been a more interactive discussion on the guild xp system but then again almost everyone is focused on end game raid balancing and class balancing so these secondary systems get shafted in the intellectual resource department. Even our smaller 25 man guild would be level 6+ if there were no caps so I think Blizzard really did the player base a major disservice by not building enough XP room into the guild leveling system. Here is the thing with large amounts of xp required between levels you hurt no one with out having a cap. By having small amounts of xp required per level and having a draconian XP/Day cap you hurt everyone except the very small social guilds. The small social guilds are likely to stay that way because of what they are and how they play.

I almost would have preferred see this system go the way of the Dance Studio than to have the broken system we have now.

So I was taking a closer look at some of the guild perks, and one of them stood out as something cool and yet annoying at the same time.

Over time to help fight gold buying/selling and such Blizzard imposed a delay on all mail transactions between World of Warcraft accounts, this was before the Battle.net merger so each wow account was and is completely separate. This is still technically true but now there is a relationship in common between the Battle.net account. As we know 1 Battle.net account can have many Blizzard game accounts associated to it, I think the limit is 10.

Now in Cataclysm we get a guild perk called G-Mail.

G-Mail
In-game mail sent between guild members now arrives instantly.

I think this is a cool change however it also annoys me a lot because those of us that do have multiple Warcraft Accounts tied to 1 Battle.net account have been asking for some of the “perks” shared between characters of 1 World of Warcraft account be translated to extend over all wow accounts within a Battle.net account.

I am not talking about paid for separate items like the mounts and Collector’s edition Pets, even though the Blizzcon perks this past year were on a Battle.net account basis so there is something to it already in place.

The 2 main issues would be instant mail between characters on the same Battle.net account on the same server since we don’t have inter-server game mail. That is a battle for another time, even though it be needed. The other would be sharing of BoA items be bound to the Battle.net Account. Since Warcraft Accounts can not be removed from a Battle.net account.

Anyway just something that I found cool and annoying at the same time. It is now shown that the time delay can be selectively lifted by joining another associated set of data. Now it is time to take it where it logically should have gone first.

Oh and yes I know that if you have 2 characters in the same guild on different accounts they would now be able to mail one another instantly, which I do and will have access to that Guild Perk. It is just something that should have already been possible and implemented and was not.